She’d had similar dreams before. They always turned into nightmares about the car fire that killed her husband. She tried to wake herself but couldn’t. The scene blurred and she was in the smoking rubble with him, crawling through collapsed concrete blocks and joists with barely enough room for her shoulders. The rough debris tore at the skin on her knees as she pushed in farther. Sweat dripped down her forehead and stung her eyes. And she could hear the cries—her husband, shouting in pain somewhere ahead.
Smoke poured through the broken stone. The hot fumes scorched her lungs. No room now. She dragged herself forward on her belly. There was a crack ahead. She pushed her head and arm in. The ground pressed against her cheek. She tried to force her way through, to get smaller, emptying her lungs, as her husband called her name.
The wreckage pressed in. Her lungs couldn’t fill. She couldn’t back up, couldn’t go farther, couldn’t see anything in the blackness.
The shouting grew faint. She heard her name one last time, and then his voice was gone.
Carol jerked upright in bed and took a long gasping breath. The clock read 5:30 a.m. She pressed her hands to her face and felt the sweat on her cheeks.
She lived alone, but every time she shut her eyes to sleep, she was sure there was someone else in the house watching, hovering over her.
Carol hadn’t been right since her husband died. She kept his semiautomatic pistol in a drawer in the nightstand. She found it in the dark now, entered the lockbox code by feel, and lifted up the gun, taking care to keep her finger out of the trigger guard. She patted the nightstand where she usually put her glasses. They were gone.
There was a rustling noise from deep in the house.
The pistol felt heavy, and the grip was too big for her hands. But the weight reassured her as she walked blindly in the dark, navigating the room by memory.
What would her clients think, she wondered, of a woman scaring herself awake with bad dreams, and taking a twenty-year-old loaded .45 with the safety off to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night?
She hit the lights and flinched to the side when she saw a figure.
But as her eyes adjusted, she realized it was just her bathrobe hanging from a hook behind the door. She found her glasses on the sink, and, with her heart pounding, she checked inside the shower.
Next, she started up the hallway, telling herself this was ridiculous but not believing it. The rest of the house was clear, but she had saved Paul’s office for last.
She wrapped her fingers around the cold knob and opened the door. She never came in here anymore. She looked over the strange bottles of liquor labeled in languages she couldn’t understand—from Luanda and Baku and God knew where else. The photos looked down through a layer of dust: her husband at Camp 4 in the Yosemite Valley, the mecca for rock climbing; fishing in Paradise Valley; skiing in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado.
She stopped next to one. Paul was wearing body armor and a helmet, PRESS written on his chest, riding a mule through a bombed-out mountain pass. His saddle was slipping to the side as the mule reached for some high grass on the trail, and he was laughing, arms thrown out, trying to keep his balance. He was a freelance photographer and did mostly nature shots and some combat work.
She could hear him laugh as clearly as if he were in the room. Her legs froze, and she felt like her throat was swelling shut. She pressed her thumbs into the corners of her eyes and swallowed, and then walked quickly back into the hall.
She couldn’t stay in there. Not yet. She touched the ring on her finger. She hadn’t taken it off. Hadn’t moved it to the right hand, though she had started wondering what was the decent interval. She pulled the door shut, walked back to her bedroom, entered the bathroom, and put down the pistol.
Carol dropped her pajama bottoms to the floor and started the shower. As the steam clouded the mirrors, she remembered the gun, took it off the counter, and walked back to the nightstand.
The edge had gone off the fear, and she looked at that lethal hunk of metal, shining with its light coat of oil. “A weapon you won’t use is less than worthless,” Paul had said once. Would I be able to pull the trigger if I found someone there, hiding behind the door? Or would he just take the gun from me while I stood paralyzed by fear?
She left it on the bed and returned to the shower. The water ran hot, almost scalding her skin until the heat was all she could feel, washing that sticky-sour smell of panic off her body. By the time she was finished, she could hear the birds calling outside. Dawn wouldn’t be too far behind. She stretched her hand out the shower door, grabbed her towel, and laughed at the bathrobe hanging off the door like a specter.
Crack and squeal, then silence. Crack and squeal. She knew the noise; it was the gate in the backyard. It was cheap, and the wind pried it open. It was still dark, and there was no way she was going out there.
In the foggy mirror, she looked at the lines around her eyes and beside her lips, and she touched the skin of her neck. A hard year since Paul had died, but it showed only in the circles under her eyes and in the set of her jaw. She didn’t look as bad as she felt, and she could see the men in town casually glancing at the ring, waiting for it to disappear.
A quarter mile away, on a steep side street, Hynd slipped into the passenger seat of a sedan and laid the syringe on his leg. A woman sat behind the wheel, her black hair pulled into a tight bun. Her strength was evident even in the loose-fitting clothes she was wearing. She was Vera Choriev, one of Hynd’s two deputies on this operation. Her mixed European and Asian features gave her a stark beauty, though few who saw her would come away with that as their first impression. They were left only with coldness.
“Is it done?”
“No,” he said. “She woke. It would have been messy, would have left too much evidence in her home.”
They waited, watching the house, until an eight-year-old BMW rolled down the driveway and turned onto the two-lane road through the valley; Carol’s car. Vera called to their backup vehicle on an encrypted radio. “She’s heading south. Pick up the tail.”
She brought the car around and raced after.
Chapter 11
THE DAWN BROKE, and Carol stopped at a traffic light on the way to her little town. She had started answering e-mails at the kitchen table with a cup of yogurt and a loaded gun next to the laptop and then thought, What the hell am I doing? I have to get out of this house. She decided to head to the bakery on Main Street. The pastries would be fresh, and she liked to catch up over coffee with the woman who ran the shop.
She didn’t notice the Toyota pickup that pulled out behind her BMW. She saw Tim, the cop from her dream, stepping out of the mini-mart attached to the Exxon station with a cup of coffee in his hand.
He gave her a wave. He was one of the guys who would check, when he thought she wasn’t looking, to see if the ring had been taken off her finger. She didn’t mind. It was nice to be noticed by a decent man, not to feel so alone. She felt the color rise in her cheeks as she thought about the night before, the dream.
Pollen drifted through the slanting morning light, and a line of black clouds over the mountain promised a break in the heat.
There was construction on the highway, so she went on the back roads. It was a longer route, little used, but she liked to drive it, twisting through a hollow with hills banking up on both sides. Forest roads branched off into the woods. She came to a Y intersection and pulled up to the stop sign.
Metal crunched. Her car jumped forward, and her skull snapped against the headrest. She looked in the rearview. A Toyota truck loomed behind her. It had rear-ended her. She couldn’t see the driver. He had stepped out and was behind the door.
She opened hers, put one foot on the asphalt, and then saw the gun barrel leveled at her face between the cab and the open driver door of the Toyota. She leaped back in the car as her window glass blew out, tinkling across the country road.
She threw the shifter into first, punched the gas, and drop
ped the clutch. She stayed low as the acceleration slammed her door shut.
Another shot. The rear window exploded. Glass cut into the skin of her neck. Fat drops of rain plunked against the roof.
Her eyes were just barely above the wheel as she turned right at a fork. Time seemed to slow, like in a dream, as her rear tires screeched, kicking gravel out as they veered off the road and a yellow traction-control light flashed on her dashboard. She was still reeling from the collision. The Toyota pulled up closer.
Blood dripped down her neck, soaked into her collar.
The movements seemed to come automatically as she watched the tachometer drift toward the red line and slightly past with each gear shift. As the first curve came, she drifted wide, then cut the corner as closely as she could, branches scraping her window, and exited wide again. The Toyota shrank in her rearview and disappeared around the curve. She didn’t know this road. It narrowed, and the broken-up asphalt shook the car, cracked her teeth together over the washboard surface.
The truck had the advantage with its high clearance and four-wheel drive. It would catch her soon. There was no time to think. Fighting the wheel took all her attention. It was a long, sweeping curve. A rise sent the car weightless, giving her a sick feeling in her stomach for a moment until the front end crashed down and her head whipped forward and the car slid sideways and threatened to roll into the ditch. She could hear the Toyota’s engine in the hills behind her.
There was no time. She saw a forest road ahead, leading back toward town. She came into it at speed, a ninety-degree turn, and slowed the car. As she turned the wheel, she stabbed the clutch and the gas and dropped the stick into second gear. The rear tires came loose as the car began to spin, and all she could see through the windshield were the second-growth trees twelve feet in front of her. She palmed her wheel into the skid. The rear tires bit just as the car ended up pointed down the unpaved side road, and she shot off over the rough surface.
She kept on, hoping the man in the Toyota would continue past on the main road. Her phone showed no signal. Rain showered down. For a moment there was quiet, then something rumbled low behind her.
She checked the rearview. No. He was coming. As she took the first curve, the tires smeared through the mud, and she brought the wheel around, fighting the skid. The road curved away from town, up the mountain. In the mirror, she could see the Toyota’s headlights, its grille growing larger and larger. She didn’t have a chance. Her BMW dipped into a rut. Brown water splashed on the windshield and for a second her tires spun uselessly as the car slipped toward the high dirt walls laced with branches.
The truck’s lights knifed through the woods behind her. She pulled her husband’s gun from the glove box, stumbled out, and clambered up the bank on her hands and knees. The rain soaked her hair, her clothes, dripped down the small of her back. She ran. The brambles tore at her shins, and a vine dragged thorns along her neck. It was an ugly forest here, overgrown and immature, and she could barely manage more than a walking pace despite all her exertions.
A door opened and slammed shut behind her. She cut to the left, thinking in a half a dozen directions at once. He would guess she’d run away, so maybe she could get around him, circle back to her car.
The mud filled her shoes, sucked them down. She reached her hand in to free her foot and stumbled another twenty yards, then stood behind a wide oak and rested her head against its bark. Her breath came fast and ragged. Wet hair was pasted to her cheek. She looked back the way she had come and saw it: broken branches, huge smears of footprints through the red clay, mud streaked over the downed trees she had jumped over.
The trail was so obvious. He would find her.
“Come out and I won’t hurt you!” The voice sounded like it was just on the other side of the tree. It was a man’s voice, loud and calm, accustomed to being obeyed.
Footsteps slopping through the mud, closer now.
“I just want to talk to you. Come on out.”
Even closer. Off to her left. He would see her any second. She pressed against the tree, wished she could shrink down to nothing.
She ducked down and saw him. He was tall and thin, wearing a simple dark blue suit, striding through the torrent in the woods like it was the most normal thing in the world. A short rifle hung from his shoulder, and as his eyes fixed on her, he brought it forward.
You’re going to fucking die! the voice screamed in her head. Run! Use the gun! It hung at the end of her trembling arm, but her hands were numb, bloodless from the fear. Her legs felt like concrete, planted there in the ground.
A weapon you won’t use is less than worthless.
She fell to one knee on the red clay, and he took aim.
Four gunshots cracked the air.
Chapter 12
WHEN YOU’RE WEAK, play strong, and when you’re strong, play weak. Hayes had taught her that a long time ago, when he was training her for Cold Harvest. If you’re undercover in a hostile city and someone follows you and corners you, don’t draw and then ask questions. That’s for the movies.
Shoot him in the face and exit the situation.
Her name wasn’t Carol Duncan, it was Claire Rhodes. And she was a headhunter, but she didn’t recruit executives. Long ago she’d learned that the only way to sell a lie is to believe it in your bones, to live it as the truth, to inhabit the persona, because you never know who’s watching.
She’d worked for Cold Harvest until a year ago, when her husband was killed, and the teammates closest to her started dying, and the commanders that had turned her into this machine cut her loose.
She sat back over her right heel with her left leg slightly in front of her, her left knee bracing the pistol in the most accurate kneeling firing position. The pungent smell of burned propellant drifted from the .45 and tingled in her nose.
She had fired all four shots.
The target dropped into the undergrowth. She moved quickly, flanking left, following her pistol, and jumped over a downed tree. The carbine had fallen to the man’s side. She dragged it away with her foot by the sling as she stepped over him and patted him down for hidden weapons.
“Who are you?” she said.
Two bullets had hit him in the eye, destroying the socket. He lay on his side.
Claire shook her head. Rusty. The first two shots had missed. In another situation that would have cost her her life.
She pressed her fingertips to the side of his neck. The pulse was barely palpable. His chest was still. His remaining eye fixed on her desperately as he clung to the last seconds of life. Sirens cried deep in the woods behind her: the police.
Even if he could talk, there was no time for intel. The authorities would be here any second.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s over.”
She aimed the gun at him, turned her head away to avoid the spray, and fired, destroying his brain stem. She scanned the woods for any accomplices, then ducked down and searched his pockets. The sirens were closer now. She had only minutes, but she needed any clue she could find about who had sent this man to kill her.
She pulled a wallet from his chest pocket and opened it. There was a badge with a five-pointed star on one side and an ID on the other.
“Department of Justice. James Grier. Deputy U.S. Marshal.”
She muttered a curse. She had just killed a federal agent. The FBI had watched her for a while after Paul was killed. She knew they suspected her. But why now? Why like this? Why not announce themselves?
Panic rose in her; her thinking became disordered.
“Carol! Carol!”
She looked back to the roadway. A police cruiser had stopped behind the Toyota. It was Tim’s patrol car. She saw him walking through the woods, his sidearm out.
Just turn around, Tim. This game is too dangerous for you. It goes too high.
But he strode on, coming to save her.
She picked up the carbine and crouched beside the lifeless body. Blood ran through the red mud, swirle
d over the leaves. She pulled back the charging handle, checked that there was a round in the chamber, then dropped the magazine and felt its weight in her hand. Plenty of ammo. She slammed it back in, rested the barrel on the downed tree, and looked through the sight.
Tim moved closer, glanced down, and saw the tracks through the mud.
“Carol! Are you okay?”
He kept the pistol at a low ready. It had been his father’s in Vietnam. He’d never used it on duty, only at the range. She remembered him talking about it at the bakery, talking about his father.
She pressed her cheek against the stock and placed the crosshairs on his heart, moving with him as the trees passed like shadows between them. She’d just shot a federal agent, and now she might have to shoot Tim to get away.
“Carol!”
Turn around, Tim. Please. I don’t want to kill anymore.
He stepped closer. He’d always been kind to her, could see when she was hurting and was there, not demanding, but ready for whenever she wanted to talk, whenever she needed someone to listen. She never did. This is why she had to live the lie. Because when people found out the truth about her, they ended up dead.
Her finger curled around the trigger, and she tracked him as he moved closer. She’d shoot when he stopped.
“Carol!” He turned and looked directly over her head.
Good-bye, Tim. I’m sorry.
Chapter 13
BLACK TIPS. THAT’S what saved his life. When she had checked the rounds in the rifle’s magazine, she saw they had black tips. M995 ammunition. The bullet was made of lead wrapped around a large ultra-hard tungsten carbide penetrator, good for punching through a bulletproof vest or killing someone inside an armored car. It was illegal in the United States, and the only Feds who used it were special teams guarding nuclear materials in transit.
Dead Man Switch Page 5
